Archery is a sport that dates back centuries. Archery practice, hunting and competitions can be found world-wide. An archer's technique, in terms of the archer's balance, stability, composure and strength, is critical for ensuring accuracy, range and consistency in delivering an arrow to the target. These skills can be acquired or improved through continual practice at different draw weights for the bow. However, such practice may be difficult considering time, financial and/or equipment constraints. Regarding this last constraint, there is no conventional training bow that provides an adequate platform for easily varying the draw weight without the use of extraneous tools and/or equipment. The ability to practice using multiple draw weights is also limited by the fact that an archer would need access to a range of bows with correspondingly different draw weight ranges, as most conventional bows have a draw weight range of only 30 pounds, at the most. Further, conventionally practicing the release of a bow is a crucial aspect of ensuring accuracy, range and consistency in delivering an arrow to the target. However, practicing the release of a conventional bow can only be achieved by releasing multiple live arrows, which requires an adequate facility. Thy-firing, or firing a conventional bow without an arrow, may damage a conventional bow. With a training bow that does not fire live arrows, users are limited to interacting with the bow and aiming in similar fashion as they would a conventional bow. Another shortcoming of existing training bows is that many, if not all, lack a sense of realism in bow size, shape and weight.
A number of virtual reality systems have recently developed archery like games. However, these games fail to simulate real life archery scenarios for a number of reasons, including the fact that these systems have wires that restrict a user's movement. In addition, these systems fail to simulate attributes of a user's bow, which include weight of the bow, draw weight, or draw length. Further, these systems fail to allow the user to modify the virtual bow to mimic the user's traditional bow that is capable of firing an arrow.
Accordingly, there is an unmet need for an archery training bow that can simulate real life archery scenarios to allow the archer to practice-in order to improve his/her accuracy while also managing psychological conditions, such as target panic.